Despite an apparently weaker showing for Québec separatism recently than for many years, ominous reports keep trickling out of the province. In today's Globe and Mail alone, there are three such.
We learn than the Parti Québécois want to establish a "Québec citizenship" requiring an "appropriate knowledge" of French. While I find it difficult to believe that anyone would immigrate into Québec without a reasonable knowledge of French anyway, as much for their own comfort as anything else, Québec is not a legal nation and so cannot impose or enforce this kind of framework. Immigrants to Canada have to prove a working knowledge of French or English, and one has to assume that those with a working knowledge of French and not English are likely to end up in Québec, so what would be the point?
Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe recenty waded into the ongoing debate (in Québec and elsewhere in Canada, but particularly in Québec) on what constitutes "reasonable accommodation" of minorities, by offering that "Quebeckers form a francophone nation in America, not a bilingual nation." Ho hum...
And then the Mouvement Montréal français (luckily not an organization with a great deal of clout) is insisting that Second Cup coffee shops call themselves "Les cafés Second Cup" within the boundaries of la belle province, on the grounds that French is being eroded by companies that have English-only names. This, clearly, is verging on the ridiculous, and conjures up images of Québec strip malls festooned with signs for "Le Burger King", "le Home Depot", "le Future Shop", etc. And what would be the appropriate translation for "Femme de Carrière", "Esprit" or "La vie en rose" (or for that matter "La Senza") in the rest of Canada? If French is so threatened by something of this nature, which I strongly doubt, then is it really worth protecting?
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